Finally Elected to the Hall, the Man Who Bought Babe ‘Root’

COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — Jacob Ruppert died in his Fifth Avenue apartment shortly before the Baseball Hall of Fame opened in 1939. Despite being the first great Yankees owner, Ruppert was neglected by voters even as less-distinguished counterparts were elected.

For decades, bronze plaques honoring a lineup full of great players on his Yankees teams have been hanging in the Hall. The bronzed likenesses of his managers Miller Huggins and Joe McCarthy have also been waiting for Ruppert, the Manhattan brewer with the slicked-back hair and neatly trimmed mustache.

Finally, last December, a veterans committee voted in Ruppert, and a great-grandniece who did not know him will speak for him at his induction.

“The whole family is so excited,” said that relative, Anne Vernon.

Ruppert was a millionaire and a bon vivant who never married or had children. He was a National Guardsman, an aide to Gov. David B. Hill of New York and a congressman from 1899 to 1907. Ruppert also kept a menagerie of small monkeys and exotic birds at his country estate in Garrison, N.Y.

But more important, at least to baseball, he made the moribund Yankees respectable and then great in his 24 years as the owner, the first third of them with Tillinghast L. Huston as co-owner.

Ruppert bought Babe Ruth from the Boston Red Sox after the 1919 season and altered the futures of both franchises. He called Ruth “Root,” but when Ruth visited Ruppert shortly before he died, he called him Babe for the first time, Ruth said at the time.

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Jacob Ruppert, a successful brewer, owned the Yankees for 24 seasons.Credit
The New York Times

Ruppert’s roster, built principally by Ed Barrow, another Hall of Famer, was filled with future Hall of Famers like Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Bill Dickey, Joe DiMaggio and Lefty Gomez.

He and Huston moved their team out of the Polo Grounds, the home of the Giants, and built Yankee Stadium. Before it opened on April 18, 1923, Ruppert bought out Huston and became the team’s sole owner.

In Ruppert’s time, the Yankees became baseball’s dominant franchise and a target for hatred and envy for their success. They won 10 American League pennants and 7 World Series under his ownership. They won their eighth World Series in 1939 — nine months after he died, and three months after Gehrig bade farewell to his playing career with his “luckiest man” speech.

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“Ruppert turned a sad-sack franchise into a dynasty,” said Peter Morris, a baseball historian who sits on the preintegration-era committee that elected Ruppert as well as the umpire Hank O’Day and Deacon White, a 19th-century catcher and third baseman. “He’s one of the few owners about whom you could say if he had not lived, baseball would have been different.”

Still, it took him 74 years to get into the Hall, where he will join a small group of owners that includes Charles Comiskey, best known for the penury that led some of his Chicago White Sox to throw the 1919 World Series; Bill Veeck, the maverick who riled the baseball establishment; and Walter O’Malley, the canny businessman who moved the Dodgers to Los Angeles, simultaneously earning the enmity of brokenhearted Brooklynites and the gratitude of fans in his new city.

George Steinbrenner, whose spending and bombast restored the legacy that Ruppert began — and who got into some mischief along the way, including two suspensions — could be the next owner to be inducted.

Ruppert did not leave many artifacts of his era behind for the Hall to show off this weekend. In the display cases on the Hall’s first floor, where the careers of new inductees are remembered — usually with bats, balls, caps, jerseys and various ephemera — Ruppert’s life is recalled with four empty beer bottles, an unfilled 24-bottle Jacob Ruppert Brewery case, a ticket to the first opening day at Yankee Stadium, a black wallet embossed with his initials, and the document that legally assigned Ruth’s contract from Boston to the Yankees.

Without much to commemorate Ruppert in its archive, “beer was an angle,” said Tom Shieber, the Hall’s senior curator. “We got a donation of the beer bottles, and the beer case came in this year,” he said. The Hall’s collection also includes two brushes, their exact purpose unknown, that were owned by Ruppert.

“They didn’t make the cut,” Shieber said.

A version of this article appears in print on July 28, 2013, on Page SP2 of the New York edition with the headline: Finally Elected to the Hall, the Man Who Bought Babe ‘Root’. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe